What Remains Beyond Monuments: A Different Kind of Travelogue
I met Jacob Shahid Masih years before I understood why I kept returning to him. We worked together briefly during a medical elective in a rather unassuming place in Northern Pakistan that quietly reshaped how I thought about faith, care, and belonging. I have written about that time before. He was a nurse by training. Looking back, that almost feels incidental. What stayed with me was the way he moved through the ward. He never seemed in a hurry. He simply seemed present. With patients. With suffering. With silence. He sang. Sometimes devotional songs in Punjabi. Sometimes playful ones in Urdu. Sometimes simply because the moment could hold them. I never knew where one tradition ended and another began. I never thought to ask. Jacob seemed equally at home in Catholic churches, Sufi shrines, hospital wards, and in the company of people whose beliefs differed from his own. He never appeared preoccupied with defending an identity. When conversations drifted towards religion, he ...